


Shadow Holocron

by frangipani



Series: Halloween [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Thrawn Trilogy - Timothy Zahn
Genre: Collateral Damage, Established Relationship, F/M, Fools in Love, Halloween, Questionable decision-making, Rule of Scary, Trippy, action adventure, and rampant stupidity, can I fit any more horror tropes no i can’t, creepfest, dub con, its horror, of course bad decisions, you were warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 03:23:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8429860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frangipani/pseuds/frangipani
Summary: Luke and Mara go to Vader’s abandoned fortress in search of Jedi artifacts. It’s a bad idea.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I know. I write too much. Lots of borrowings and homages here to my favorite scary media, but they’re all cliche at this point anyway. 
> 
> Canon notes -- I know Vader’s fortress was destroyed, this is where this fic AUs...among other bits I’ve changed for my nefarious purposes. Rushed, but come on, Halloween!
> 
> Spoiler alert: should have stayed home and done the GFFA equivalent of netflix and chill([holo and chill](http://teagrl.tumblr.com/post/158283654032/during-hologram-and-chill)?) instead.

10ABY

I.

The fortress was perched on top of a cliff with craggy rocks below, awash with white foam from the crashing waves of Coruscant’s turbid western sea. The chill had been increasing the closer they approached, different from what Luke would normally think of as cold. This was a damp version of it that snuck in through the fabric of his clothes. He pulled the jacket tighter around himself. It didn’t help. He was tempted to use the Force, but it wasn't as bad as all that. He'd get used to it.

“You couldn’t have chosen a better time?” Mara asked, parking the landspeeder at the foot of the hill. She adjusted her hairscarf against the wind that threatened to blow it clean off her head, the sound of the surf loud enough that she had to raise her voice to be heard over it. She had gotten out and was looking towards the horizon to an ominous gathering of dark clouds across the cloudy sky, just above the shadowy mountain range in the distance.

“I know.” From the passenger seat, Luke craned his neck to get a better look at the fortress at the top of the hill. “But they said any rain would start at night. It’s only morning now -- we’ll be gone by then.” He slid out of the speeder.

“I hope so, but these places always tend to be bigger inside than they seem.” She gestured to the complex above them. The walls that had bounded it had been reduced to rubble shortly after the liberation of Coruscant four years ago, but the structure beyond it was left intact. It was a small rectangular building that reminded Luke more of a military base than a fortress, out of place with the dramatic landscape around it. “I hope you know where to begin.”

Luke grinned and pulled his datapad out. “As a matter of fact Armed Forces gave me their blueprints. It’s actually not that big inside and mostly empty.”

Mara’s concerned look didn’t melt away. There was something distant about the way she looked at the complex. 

“You said you haven’t been here before,” Luke began tentatively.

She blinked, her eyes focusing again. “No. I haven’t. Vader never had much time for me.”

“You feel anything...wrong?” he asked, reigning over the impulse he always had to ask more. She’d volunteer when she felt ready. Even if she’d decided not to train for the foreseeable future, he was acquainted enough with her danger sense not to underestimate it.

Mara laughed sharply. “No, but that doesn’t mean much. The question should be, do you?”

Luke shook his head. “Nothing.” He stretched out with the Force. All he felt was a blankness to the place where he had expected some vague residue of evil, although there really was not much around it at all. 

“The records said that Vader never lived here even though he had it made.” He wished that he’d had time to send her all the information he had found, but she’d only arrived in Coruscant several hours ago, and had been inundated with work ever since she’d dropped out of hyperspace before that. They’d been lucky she’d found time at all to join him, so he'd made do with just sending her a rough summary of his findings.

“You think he just used it to store things?”

“Maybe. Armed Forces didn’t find anything.”

“They’re not Jedi though.”

Luke threw her a half smile, thinking, exactly. “So there may be something they missed. Something they thought not worth looking at.”

Mara sighed. “You’re awful at planning dates, you know that, don’t you?”

“This isn’t a date,” he corrected, indignant. “I got us reservations at Yuza Bre tomorrow. _That’s_ the date.”

“Yuza Bre” Her eyebrows went up. “Takes months to get a table." She narrowed her eyes. "Did you mind trick them?”

“No, I made it when Karrde forwarded me your schedule. If you hadn’t kept to it, he grinned, " _then_ I would have mind tricked them into switching it.”

Mara chuckled and came over to him. He knew the signs enough to wrap his arms around her even if he hadn’t perceived that hue in her sense he’d come to know as her being charmed. Things had happened relatively quickly between them. Well, when they’d happened. He’d handed her his old lightsaber and then it’d been radio silence up until she showed up at the makeshift offices the NR had given him. She’d given the lightsaber back with a haunted, regretful look, but invited him to dinner with an endearing awkwardness that took a bit of the sting off. By the time Karrde had needed her in person for a deal half a year later, Luke had come to recognize that the invitation had turned out to have been into her life. The compromises that followed seemed as natural as the way things had progressed between them.

Mara was warm and solid, a pleasant contrast to the cutting, chilly wind. This relationship between them was not what he’d expected when he’d given her the lightsaber. Much more than he could have hoped or even imagined. He rested his head against hers, catching the scent of her shampoo even in the sea breeze. She might train someday yet. 

“Oh, that’s not a very Jedi thing to do.” Her voice was muffled by his jacket.

“It’s a welcome back.” Luke smiled down at her. He would have put excursion off in to soak in her return, but she was completely booked for weeks as far as New Republic Trade meetings were concerned, and he wasn’t sure when she’d have her next break to leave the City. He knew he’d wanted her with him for this, and he’d stopped second guessing feelings like that ages ago. Besides, there'd be time enough for proper welcomes in a bit. “Should be special.” 

“More special than digging around in Vader’s fortress?” Her voice took on a wry note as she pulled away. “You spoil me. Pass me that datapad.”’

\---

Armed Forces had given him the codes they’d reprogrammed into the blast doors at the entrance, so getting in wasn’t much of an issue. With a hiss the blast doors opened to a dark space within. Mara was already reaching into her pack for a glow rod, handing him the datapad. 

The glow rod lit up a wide corridor whose end they couldn’t see from the entrance. Mara stepped in with him beside her.

“Only one level, right?" Mara’s voice rang out in the empty space. The air smelled stale from the enclosure, just as cold and damp inside as outside. He rubbed his arms.

Mara angled her head in his direction. “Cold?”

“Thought it would be better inside. It’s the combo of wet and cold.” He shook his head. He’d hated it since Dagobah.

“It’s not cozy, that’s for sure,” Mara agreed as they kept walking down. 

“Maybe we’ll run into some temp control panel,” he muttered, thumbing on the datapad. “Let’s get to the command center. Easier if we get the power working. We don’t have to carry that around all the time then.” He nodded in the glow rod’s direction.

Mara looked down over her shoulder. “Oh, we’re not far.” They had just reached a point where the corridor divided into left and right. They turned right, walking further to a nondescript door. “Should be here...”

Mara held the glow rod over, as Luke fiddled with the door’s controls -- once again using the codes that the Armed Forces has reprogrammed, and it hissed open. “You know, I still think we should have brought Artoo. Who knows what state the mainframe will be in, and if it’s not responsive we’re just--” 

Danger blared through the Force as with a screech a panel on the floor slid open. Mara had stopped, but one of her feet found only empty air below. She would have tumbled down if Luke hadn’t grabbed the back of her jacket, yanking her back. 

His blood was pounding in his ears. 

“Armed Forces cleared all the traps?” she said after a moment. There was a slight shake to her voice, although he sensed her schooling the spike of anxiety down. She bent down and scooted forward to examine the entryway it had opened. On a closer look, it seemed like a hatch, displaying steep duracrete steps that led below.

“Not a trap,” she summed up. “Looks like there’s a basement level.”

Luke crouched down and looked down at the blueprints on the datapad screen, then back at the opened space. “That’s something they should have noted.”

“Maybe the mechanism was jammed or something and they didn’t trigger it.” Mara looked over to him the light from the glow rod sweeping shadows from her face, making her eyes a darker shade of green. He had the impulse to place his palm to side of her face and feel the warmth of her skin. And why shouldn’t he? She was _home_. He reached forward and did just that.

“It’s not an investigation until someone discovers a hidden chamber,” she said, but covered his hand with hers and squeezed briefly before moving away. She stood walking around the open panel to the command module of the fortress and looking through the switches. “Okay, let’s try this.” She flipped a couple.

Nothing happened.

She flipped them again. Then tried once more. She groaned. “It can’t possibly be out of power. The Empire built stuff better than that.”

He went over to the module. “Maybe something got fried down the line. It was Vader’s fortress, maybe someone got overly enthusiastic and shot something they shouldn’t have.”

“Yeah, but if Armed Forces had enough power to reprogram the access codes, then it should have been working when they left.” 

“That was four years ago,” he reminded her. “Humidity always does a number on electronics.” 

She pulled away from the module with a disgusted noise. “We do this the annoying way then. Where to? Down the hatch?”

Luke shook his head. “I want to go over this floor first.”

“You know, I could go down while--”

He threw her a skeptical look. “We’re not splitting up.”

“Think how much time we would save,” Mara pressed. “And then we’d be out of this conservator.”

“And if you or I find something?”

“I have my comm. You have yours. We also have hands to operate them with.”

“I have a feeling it’d take us more time to find each other again,” he waved a hand around the room, “in this, than to actually go together and...” He paused.

Irritation sparked from her. “And?”

Luke smiled again. “It’s easier to input access codes when you’re holding the glow rod.”

Her retort was cut off by a loud grinding sound, as if from stone against stone. They shared a look and darted back to the door, unsure what to expect. He felt no danger, but his hand dropped by his lightsaber.

After a moment he reached into his pack for his own glow rod, lighting it and sweeping over the direction from which they’d have come. There was nothing in the corridor. 

“Uh, Luke?” 

“See something?” he asked, stretching out with the Force. Just that same blankness, a kind of mutedness, broken up only by Mara’s presence. 

“No, that’s the problem.” 

He shifted his attention to her. “What?”

“I could have sworn this corridor continued.” He followed the path lit by her glow rod to a wall. He grabbed his datapad again.

“Well the ‘prints say it does.” He looked up, not quite remembering if he had seen that wall. He closed his eyes, going through a memory technique. 

Luke felt his skin prick with goosebumps. 

“It did,” he said quietly.

“Okay,” Mara replied just as quietly. “So that’s not a wall. It’s a door. And it just slid shut.”

\---

On a closer inspection, it didn’t _seem_ like a door. They could find no mechanism that triggered it and no mechanism to slide it back open. At a loss, they turned back and walked down the corridor.

“We should go.” Luke sensed her wariness mounting along with his own. “Doesn’t feel right.”

“You feel anything?” 

“No, it’s all...blank. There’s nothing.” His words were beginning to come out clipped. “I’m beginning to wonder if that’s not a flag.”

“Wait. What do you mean nothing?”

“Just that. The only living things here are me and you.”

“No...evil.”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t have to be evil to be wrong.” He stopped suddenly. “We should have been by the entrance by now.”

“We should have.” Mara’s voice was tight. “Maybe we missed it.”

He knew they hadn’t.

“I don’t...I don’t feel anything.” An undertone of frustration had snuck into her voice. “Dangerous, I mean.”

“It doesn’t feel like the dark side. We’d know.”

“Hold on,” Mara said.

“What?”

She turned lifting her glow rod...into the open door of a room. It was the only door they’d seen thus far, apart from the command room they’d left behind. 

Luke stepped out in front of her into the room. He moved his glow rod up to reveal with another command module...and an open panel that lead to stairs below.

“What are the chances?” she whispered.

Luke took a step back. “It’s dark, maybe we got disoriented.” It sounded like weak reasoning to his own ears, but if there was something with the Force involved he would have sensed it. He _knew_ he would have. 

There was another loud grinding sound from the corridor.

\---

They had turned and gone back to the hallway, continued further past the second command room to find another wall like the one that had come to being when they’d left the room. A quick check on the blueprints revealed them to have been rendered useless. The area looked nothing like the one pictured.

They whirled and went back down the corridor finding it shorter this time around than they’d initially perceived it...and no rooms other than the one command center with the stairs that lead below. Much as he tried, Luke still couldn’t sense anything other than blankness, even though there was no question that _some_ energy was being expended here.

As unsettling as that was, it was nothing compared to the growing awareness of what it meant. 

“You think it’s trying to trap us?” Mara spoke up as they sat down on the corridor to rest for a bit, their backs against the duracrete walls. Luke could feel the cold from them seeping into his clothes and then his skin. He tamped down on a shiver, bringing his knees up. The chrono said they’d been exploring the area for several hours now. 

“I’d feel that kind of intent. You would too.”

She made a vague impatient sound. “Maybe it’s not sentient that way. Maybe we just triggered a kind of mechanism.” She’d been holding on to that theory since the that wall had materialized.

“If it was dangerous, we’d sense that too.” A more reassuring thought occurred to him. “Maybe I overreacted -- it could be the doing of some Jedi artifact. Maybe it’s leading us to it.” The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. It would have done more than simply changed the outline of their surroundings if it was malicious. “That’s why there’s only one path. That’s a pretty big sign.”

Her expression went skeptical. “Yeah, I guess you can call it that.”

“What else would you call it?” 

“A bad idea?”

“More than repeatedly wandering around a corridor that just inexplicably changes shape to get us to the same place?” Luke brought his arms around himself. Not that he wasn’t eager to get out of this wet cold, but if it was a Jedi artifact this powerful, it could be worth the trouble.

“Yeah,” Mara grumbled. “Maybe we should get the thermal detonators out and blow the wall up. See how clever the mechanism is then.”

“Sounds a bit rash.” He wasn’t averse to more blunt force it if that’s what it came down to. He just wasn’t sure their situation warranted it just yet.

“I guess.” She went for a water bottle. “That something is just taking away options until there’s just one...I don’t like it. Like it’s caging us in.”

He nodded. “It’s a little indirect.” He brought an arm around her shoulder as she sat back with the water bottle. Drawing her close brought a measure of relief from the cold and he felt her relax a bit, a good idea overall. “But maybe that’s all it can do to guide us. We can play along for now.”

“And if it turns out to be trouble?”

Luke smiled. “Then we can blow it up.” 

\---

After making an impromptu lunch out of ration bars they were finally ready to set out down the stairs. They both trained their glow rods down the steps. Unsurprisingly, Luke couldn’t see the bottom. He started down.

“Careful,” Mara warned, her voice reverberating off the walls of the narrow passage.

He looked back up. Her eyes seemed huge from the angle of the glow rods, her hair melting away into the darkness. “Is that actually concern for my welfare?” 

“No, it’s concern over our dinner reservations,” she corrected, a faint smile coming over her face as she set down on the first steps. “I’m right behind you and very much looking forward to Yuza Bre.”

It was a longer way down than Luke had anticipated, but finally the stairs led to a wide, circular space, the bases’ functional architecture giving way to a more primitive cave-like opening, the permacrete now a dirt floor. 

Luke adjusted the settings on his glow rod to make it brighter. There seemed to be nothing in the space, just as there had been nothing in the corridor. Cold bit at him more, the humidity going up, he assumed, by the stone walls in place of duracrete.

Again, he stretched with the Force and found...nothing. That same blankness. A thick sheet of it.

“I heard,” he began thoughtfully, putting his pack down a few paces from the side of the stairs-- this was something he’d been mulling over during the long way down. “That Palpatine covered up the energies of the more powerful Jedi amulets he had amassed to prevent them from interfering with his power. The same way he did with the Jedi Temple.”

Mara was walking around the room. She’d set her glow rod on the highest setting and had left it in the center of the room after having left her own pack at the side of the stairs. Its illumination was about as much as a kind of bonfire. Luke decided to shut and stow his for the moment to conserve its power. “You think Vader did the same thing?”

“Notice how there’s no living energies close to here, maybe that’s what it took to cover it up.”

“You still getting nothing specific?”

“Nothing but that. My guess is that it wants us to...uncover it in some way.”

She blew out a sigh. “So we wait until whatever it is drops us a crumb again.”

He took out the datapad to give another scan to the now-useless blueprints. Looked up at a quick, movement at his peripheral vision, a blur of dark against the illumination the glow rod gave. Nothing. Just shadows peeling back from the light. He stared at them for a moment, hoping for some sign.

“It should. Obviously whatever it is has a lot of power to overcome whatever it blocking it,” he said.

“Or maybe it’s just you.”

He started at finding Mara sitting beside him. Hadn’t she been by the wall just a few seconds ago?

Was that the sign? He put a hand on her arm, reassured by the solidity of it in spite of himself, and feeling more silly with every passing moment. “Maybe we should look at the walls.”

She nodded, but didn’t make any move to rise. “What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know.” He thought for a bit. “A holocron, maybe. Fits the bill. They’re very powerful.”

“What are they exactly?”

“Never heard of them?” 

She shook her head. “I was just a soldier.” A faint tinge of bitterness came into her voice. “He didn’t really expose me to any of that.”

Privately, he found it a bit comforting. Less to unlearn when she did decide to train. “They’re repositories of knowledge. But...deep knowledge. Apparently you can learn from a holocron like you could from a mentor or a teacher. Old masters would pour all their knowledge into the holocrons for posterity. They can hold a part of their presence through the Force, creating a kind of gatekeeper avatar.”

“Hold a part of their presence -- how is that possible?”

“They're repositories. Lore calls them vessels. But there might be some exaggeration in what I’ve read. Like I said, I haven’t actually found one yet.”

“Not at Palpatine’s Archives?”

“Not that I’ve found. He could have had them destroyed.”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t sound like him. Not with something like that.”

“Or hidden away in places like this. But,” he continued, “Even going through all the Jedi artifacts he amassed, there’s a lot I haven’t gotten through yet. Or, maybe,” he frowned, “examined deeply enough. Could be I’ve encountered one and it just hasn’t...revealed itself to me.”

Humor came into her voice. “Revealed itself?”

“Like this.” The more he thought about it the more it made sense. “You can’t just open a holocron, the mechanism by which it opens is as varied as the master who made it.”

Mara stood up. “All of this would be so much easier if we could talk to that gatekeeper.” 

Luke went for the opposite wall, but could see nothing, just the reddish brown stone of the walls. He turned back to Mara. “You’d have to open--” he stopped just as she moved, some of her braid had come loose and the shadows of its tendrils suddenly resembled rustling branches that kept _reaching_ across the walls...

“Luke?”

He shook his head to clear it. He’d been to plenty of creepy places in his time. He wasn’t going to give in to childish jitters.

“The shadows are creepy,” he said. There, just as he’d said it everything seemed to become ordinary. He couldn’t imagine feeling the kind of sharp disquiet he’d felt moments ago.

Luke expected Mara to poke at him, but she simply took a step back, her shadow growing smaller as she did. “I hate waiting around for this thing to guide us.” She looked at her chrono and Luke felt a flare of apprehension through the Force. “My chrono has stopped.”

He went to his bag to checked his, finding the same. “I guess it doesn’t want us fixating on time.” He sat down beside it.

“It’s unrooting us. Making us feel vulnerable.” Luke could almost hear her teeth gnash. “I don’t like that either."

“Maybe that’s part of it,” he suggested after a moment. “It might want us humbled to be more receptive to whatever it has to teach. Or not fixated on the material world.” He smiled crookedly. “These things are rarely linear or rational.”

She came over to sit by him. “So then what?”

He brought his arm around her again. “We humor it some more.”

Mara hmph’ed, but leaned a bit more heavily against him. 

“I just wish it weren’t this cold,” he murmured, wrapping his arms tighter around her. “I’m just using you as a heat pack now.” 

She chuckled. “No ulterior motives?”

“Too cold.”

She made a disappointed sound, deep in her throat and that was an invitation for all sorts of ulterior motives. He did kiss her like he’d wanted to when he’d gone to pick her up at the spaceport, deliberate and lingering. Mara moved forward and the unpleasant cold of the space dissolved as he rediscovered the arch of her neck, the beat of her pulse point under his lips.

“So,” she broke off with a sharp breath, her hands tightening on his shoulders, “you did miss me.”

He looked at her, incredulous, ducking a hand under her jacket and passing it over her breast, warm through the fabric of her shirt. “Of course I missed you.” She _had_ to know. If he’d stopped to give free reign to how much, they would have never left the spaceport much less come here.

Mara tilted her head, running a hand down his shoulder and he lifted her by the hips until she was on his lap, the heat of her all he needed. Her breath whispered hotly along his Adam’s apple, her hands went under his shirt, and he hissed as much because her hands were warm and tingled on his skin, as from the cold that immediately shot in.

“Like this?” Her hands drifted up to the center of his chest. “Show me.”

“I want to,” Luke gasped out roughly as she pushed her hips down against him. He cupped her bottom and sucked at a spot where her jaw met her neck. She moaned, which made his hips hitch against her. “But I want to take your clothes off.”

“Yeah?” Her hands moved up from his stomach to his chest. The movement made his shirt ride up and he shivered, the cold stunning him for a second.

Luke shelved it by force of will to kiss up to the curl of her ear, bit lightly at her earlobe. “And mine.”

“And?” Mara's hands went back down cup him through his pants. 

He sucked in a breath and choked out her name, pulling enough space to bring his hands to either side of her face and slant his mouth over hers. “And make love to you,” he said after pulling away. He folded his hand over hers and drew it gently away. “It’s just so cold.”

Mara pulled his mouth down to hers with her free hand for another kiss. “I can keep you warm.”

He was sure she could, for a time, but the persistent cold gave him enough rationality to think past melting into her to the uncomfortable realities of after. He pulled away with a frustrated groan, caught his breath with his cheek against the side of her neck, thinking that the last he needed was for her to misread his reluctance. 

“Maybe we should have waited to come here. Especially with you having just gotten back.” Luke sighed, he could kick himself. Why did it have to be now? He could have waited the months until her schedule cleared up. 

Mara drew away a bit to look down at him. “You did make some case about my schedule being too booked. Sounded persuasive at the time.” He felt something else from her and shifted to meet her eyes.

“What else?”

“I don’t know, I felt like we should. Couldn’t explain it.”

He knew because he’d felt something similar. He kept his arms around her waist. “Never let me plan anything just after you get in again. Never.”

She chuckled. “I think we have bedrolls in the packs. You know, to get it out of our system.”

Luke thought about it, but while he was tempted, the idea of being naked in this clammy atmosphere put him off. Something about it didn’t feel right. Rushing it like she said was even less appealing.

It wasn't just him though. “You want to?”

Mara dropped her head to the side. “No, I think you’re right,” she said hesitantly. “Worth waiting for an actual bed in an actual room.”

He smoothed back her hair. “I’ll make it up to us.”

She closed her eyes. “Oh, you'd better.”

He kissed her, nipping lightly at her lower lip. 

Mara opened her eyes, they widened just as she stiffened in his arms, her alarm rippling through the Force. “There’s another doorway,” she whispered shakily.

“Where?”

“Right behind you.” 

Luke turned his head where the stairs should have been. A large archway had come into being.

Mara slid away and stood. 

"I guess that's the crumb," he said. Now, he simply felt a stab of impatience as he went for his glow rod. "Leave yours," he gestured to the one lighting up the room. "Let's just get this over with."

She nodded, her disquiet still hovering about her Force presence, deepening his impatience with this whole situation. He took a step inside the archway, to what looked like another corridor. His feet found uneven steps, and Luke moved the glow rod lower for a better look.

"Watch your step. The ground's uneven," he called back to her. "Stones." His footing slipped a bit, and he put a hand on the wall, it came back cold and wet, as if water had been running down. Startled, Luke drew it back with a surprised sound, the abrupt motion making his already precarious footing give --

The last thing he knew was Mara yelling his name.

\---

“Or maybe it’s just you.”

Luke woke up with a gasp, as if he’d heard the words. He was warm, warm enough to be comfortable and shifted a bit, realizing he wasn’t alone. Hair was tickling his nose. His head hurt a bit, he reached behind to a sore spot.

“Does it hurt?” Mara was craning her head to look up at him. 

He was naked, Luke realized, and so was she. How had that happened? He shifted slightly, her legs rubbing against his. That was...unexpected.

“What happened?”

“You fell. When you came to, you were too cold. So I put you in one of these.”

His eyes landed on a bruise right below Mara’s neck. The skin was dark purple, almost black, and raised, a vague imprint of teeth on it. Luke lifted a hand towards it, confused. He hadn’t thought he left behind something so garish. 

“I did this?”

Mara looked at him, a bit puzzled, but amused. “Hard for me to reach, no?”

Luke frowned, drawing his hand away. “The clothes?”

“You took them off.” She smirked. “Yours and mine. I guess you felt you had to make up for lost time.” Worry darted through her features at his expression. “Are you okay?”

He couldn’t remember... “What time is it? Wait,” Luke shook his head. “No chrono, right?”

She flashed him an odd look. “What? No, it’s around midnight we’ve been out maybe a couple of hours.”

He stared at her. “Did anything happen? Like did the room shift?" He rubbed at his face. "Wait, we both slept?"

Mara laughed a bit nervously. “You’re beginning to worry me now. Nothing happened in the room.” She winced a little. “And yeah, I fell asleep too.”

“Midnight, but wait...the chrono had stopped, both yours and mine --”

Her expression shifted to understanding. “Oh, right before you fell. Yeah, my chrono did stop -- spoke too soon though, we lost just a couple of minutes. Maybe there’s some odd electrical pulse from the base.”

Luke felt strangely comforted. It was as he remembered except for the fall. He probably should get up get dressed and see what else was beyond the archway, but he was too comfortable here and dreaded the thought of navigating through that uneven terrain again. Luke brought his arms around her, soaking in the warm of her skin, just as he became more aware of the biting cold outside the bedroll. 

“I hope you got some rest," he murmured. Even with near a year of being involved, Mara still slept restlessly when they shared a bed, probably leftovers from her previous line of work. She’d wake up several times a night, sometimes startled and shaking, a strange somnambulist look. She got over it quickly enough and went back to sleep, but it’d be obvious enough the next morning that she hadn’t rested well. He thought they could work on that now that she was back. "I know you like your space.” 

She chuckled. “Only you would be talking about space now.”

Luke scooted down a bit to drop a kiss by her temple, his hand sliding down her naked back. “This is just not as --”

“Actually, I like the lack of space between us fine right now.”

That was true enough, her presence fairly radiated interest, already clear from the press of her body against his. He brushed his lips down her jaw as his hand reached her hip and she gasped, arching against him with a cry. He blinked, that reaction was oddly strong. He lowered a hand between her legs, finding her very wet, and not that he was complaining but... 

“Were you dreaming of me?” he whispered in her ear.

Mara moaned as his fingers sank inside her, the sound reverberating through the empty room. “You left,” his thumb slid up to stroke against her clit, “unfinished business.”

That was true, enough to make him feel self-conscious. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She cursed low and twisted against his hand. “Make it up to me.” Which really went without saying. Her eyes had closed as her breaths became sharper. “Still good.”

Luke dragged his other hand lightly across her midriff. “What?”

She meant to laugh, but it came out as a quick exhalation between pants. Her eyes opened again, they'd shaded to pine green in the room's low lighting. Briefly, he thought of trees with gnarled branches that _reached_ , but then she groaned. “Don't...don’t stop.” 

He wasn’t, Luke shifted a bit to nuzzle her neck staying well away of that painful-looking bruise on her neck as he stroked her. It just wasn’t like him, but she broke off with a louder moan, and he could tell from the way Mara was gripping his free arm, the way clenched around his fingers that she was close. Her hips desperately pushed up against his hand, and he eased up on the pressure, captivated by how she squirmed in search for more. He slid his fingers into her, crooking them, leaning a bit to lick at her collarbone, her skin supple and warm under his lips, mouthed against it to hear her moan go higher pitched. While he did want to settle between her legs and slide inside her, that was really only a half pleasure.

He brought his free palm to the side of her face, watching her eyes flutter open and alight on him, and this was fuller than that, he thought as she keened his name and shuddered. He nuzzled her neck while he waited for her breathing to even out the vaguely disturbed feeling resurfacing. 

“It’s just strange...,” he murmured, brows knotting again at that mark on her neck. He didn’t remember biting her. Luke's thoughts broke off when her hand closed around him, couldn't help but buck into her grasp. Unease melted away in her hands, drawn away by the promise her touch held. Later, he thought. He’ll think about it later.

Mara shifted to her side, letting her free hand move up his side in a touch he recognized as a kind of prompt. Luke scooted back, turning to his side, facing her, and she angled her hips, sliding her legs through his, drawing him inside her. His eyes closed as the sensation took his breath away.

“Thought you got it out of your system,” she sighed, rolling her hips against his, her leg draped over his hip. “Glad you didn’t.” 

He rocked against her, feeling pleasure-dazed, splayed a hand down the smooth skin of her back again, and slid it down to grasp at her bottom to pull her closer. It took him a few seconds to register what she'd said, and then it was too confusing, so he kissed her languidly. She clenched her thighs, and he groaned at the tight heat of her, warm, inside and out, gasped as she stole the air right from his lungs. 

They lingered for a bit, him brushing kisses along her jaw, feeling her fingers stroking along his nape until she pushed him onto his back, astride him now, the movement pushing the top of the bedroll away. Cold immediately assailed him, but Luke was more distracted by the haphazard map of red bite marks from the side of Mara’s breasts to her belly. High at one hip there was another startlingly dark bruise, almost black against her pale skin.

“What?” Mara caught the line of his stare, but not before bringing her hips down, and doing it again and again, fast enough that he let out a stuttered groan, thrusting up, a hand coming up to her hip. That hip, he thought just before his thoughts short circuited. Luke’s eyes veered up to her flushed face, sleep tousled hair, peaked nipples as her breasts rise and fall, thinking he couldn't feel the cold anymore. Just her.

“You...took my clothes off...bit me.” Mara closed her eyes briefly and Luke passed a hand down from her shoulder to midriff, the curves of her body much more intelligible than her words. She clasped his hand in hers, bringing it up to her face and turning her cheek to it, the creaminess of her cheek strangely like the soft underbelly of a manka cat. “ All over...and fucked me.” And with the way she was moving there was only the build of pleasure, all anchored in her.

Her shoulders angled forward as she came with a throaty cry, his hands tightening on her hips. He gasped out her name, everything giving way.

Once he could think straight again he reached over and across from her for the top of the bedroll, pulling it back over them. He was _freezing._.. and then there was dread winding at the pit of his stomach.

“Mara,” Luke began. “This is not -- did we --?”

She looked up at him curiously. “Did we what?”

He swallowed. “We’ve done this,” he gestured between them, “once. Here. Right? As in...just right now. Right?”

She blinked. “What do you mean?”

He steeled himself. “When did I give you this?” He very lightly skimmed his index finger on the bruise on her neck. He’d hoped, he really hoped for the answer he knew he wouldn’t get.

Mara’s face had begun to crease with worry. 

“The first time," she whispered.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay. This is a pretty long part and it required massive overhauling from where I started.  
> Everybody ready for some rock and roll? *cracks knuckles* Let's go.
> 
> Canon notes after part 3

II.

 

Mara didn’t think she’d ever seen Luke that pale. 

Every last bit of color had drained from his face the more she went over what had happened. They’d been going down the stairs, he’d slipped and fell. When he’d come to, he’d been shivering so hard, he could hardly speak and she’d gotten them inside the bedroll. She supposed the heat must have lulled her to sleep too because she’d only been woken up by his questing hands and mouth on her skin. 

Right about then, it had been all she wanted. Not that she didn’t understand Luke’s focus on the trip; she could get hung up on her work too. The fact that he’d wanted her along felt right even if she didn’t share his enthusiasm with digging up the past. It was reassuring nonetheless to get confirmation that he’d wanted her in more mundane ways as well. She'd never been away for months before, surely that had to mean something.

If it had been a bit less controlled, less careful, or generous than she’d come to expect, that was fine too. Novel. It’d been pleasant on other levels, and she knew things would be back to form soon enough. Mara hadn’t expected _that_ soon, but sure, she could do with putting another pause on this jaunt for others of a more pleasant nature. 

So she’d been left confused by his general jitteriness and his questions right after. That was until he drew in a breath and pulled away. Mara felt her eyes widen, everything falling into place like a puzzle piece. 

“You don’t remember.”

Luke shook his head. “I remember something very different.” His voice went strained and he started shivering. “I...It’s affecting my perception of reality. It’s...it’s wrong.” He quickly went through another account -- one where he _hadn’t_ fallen down the stairs, where they’d been waiting for some sort of sign until an archway had materialized. According to him, _that_ was where he’d fallen, and there'd been absolutely no bedroll jaunts. 

There was something Mara had rarely seen in his face when he finished. Fear. She shifted forward and clasped his hands. “Okay,” she breathed. “Okay.” This was a problem to be solved like any other. Nothing to be gained by panicking. That just made things worse.

“If it can go into my head, whatever it is--”

“It?” Her voice left her in a rush, panic already gathering in the thud of her pulse. “You feel something?”

“No,” Luke seemed to push the words out grimly. “I don’t.”

“Simplest explanation,” Mara said after a moment, her voice hushed. “You fell, you got disoriented and forgot we were here.”

He shook his head, eyes falling back down on the mark on her neck. “Not like that. That’s not like me.”

Mara gave him a faint smile. “We’ve never been apart this long before. You missed me.”

His expression crossed into disbelief. “I know what I’m like, Mara. That’s--that’s --”

Mara squeezed his hands hard. “So do I,” she said emphatically. “I know what you’re like. And I know what you feel like. If it wasn’t you, I would know. I would feel it, even without training I’d know that much.” 

Luke turned his face away. “I should remember.”

“You fell,” Mara repeated and the more she thought about it, the more plausible it became. That was the most alarming thing. If he were hurt they wouldn’t know until they left. Traumatic head injuries could have some effect on response disinhibition, but not so quickly, she didn’t think. She hadn’t thought it was that hard a fall either, but his reaction now was worrisome. 

They just needed to find what mechanism was controlling the fortress and get out of here. She spat an internal curse at Vader. Trust his paranoia to have built a slashrat trap that had outlived him enough to strike back at them near a decade later. Once they were back topside, she was going to _relish_ blowing it to hell and back. 

Luke was still too pale. 

“Hey,” Mara burrowed closer. After a second she asked, “Do you...” She swallowed and made herself plow through, “Want those memories. Mine, I mean.”

His head jerked up in surprise and he pulled away slightly. “No.”

Mara bit her lip. “It might make you less spooked to get out of your head for a bit.”

“That’s the problem in the first place,” Luke muttered under his breath.

“Then maybe the poison is the cure.” She rested her forehead against his, raising one of her hands to his nape. His hair was slightly shorter now than she remembered it being before she left. He closed his eyes and she felt the tension dial back a bit. “You’re sure?”

Luke brought his arms around her. “Yes. You don’t like it.” And he was right. There were few things she found more unpleasant than someone in her head given how things had ended up last time, but she’d put up with it if she had to. They just needed to get out of here. 

“It’s fine,” he said, shifting away. At least he’d stopped shivering.

“You know what I think?” Mara ventured as they dressed. “I think that this is a good old fashioned deathtrap. There’s got to be some mechanism that is opening and closing doors and we triggered it upstairs. We just have to find it. Carefully.”

He threw her another bemused look. “You said upstairs that something was taking away our options.”

She nodded. “That same mechanism. Probably powered through a battery underground -- actually that explains why there’s no power in the base as a whole. All of it is being used to manipulate its layout.”

“But a holocr-- oh,” Luke went quiet suddenly.

“What?”

“I thought we talked about this, in...in what I remember. I...I think it’s some kind of holocron that is somehow...hidden in the Force or covered up in some way.” He turned pensive as he pulled his jacket tighter around him. “My presence triggered it and that’s why it’s affecting me.” He rubbed at his face. “It could still be that.”

“What’s a holocron?”

He paused. As if hastily summarizing, he said, “A powerful artifact that holds knowledge.”

“Like a datacard?” Mara finished pulling on her boots and checking the power pack on her blaster. 

“Something like that, but operated through the Force. It unleashes a great deal of energy from what I’ve read.”

“But you haven’t...” Mara let herself trail off, he knew what she was going to say. She still had to though. “I don’t know. I don’t doubt there’s something here. Vader wouldn’t have gone through this much trouble if there wasn’t. But it still seems like a stretch that it could affect you this much without you sensing _something_.”

“How do you explain what I remember -- don’t,” he looked up from where he had crouched to pack up their things and raised a hand, “don’t say I fell.”

“But you did!” Mara let out a stilted laugh. “Look, this place is getting to you, I understand that, and it's _normal_ , especially after that, but for it to be _literally_ getting to you? Through some artifact? I don’t know.” She thought for a moment. “And there’s precedent for places like this -- with mechanisms that deter beings from leaving." She rattled off several names.

“Those are all Imperial prisons,” Luke pointed out. “This was never used as a prison. It’s labeled as a fortress in all the files. All of them.”

“Well, it’s doing a good job of keeping us in.” Mara gave yet another look at the circular room they were in. “Could have just been misclassified.” She’d only given it a cursory examination before, too concerned over Luke. Just because they hadn’t been able to find the mechanism upstairs didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be able to here.

She went to Luke’s pack and got his glow rod to give a more detailed pass through the walls.

“Notice,” she continued. “That the panel that led down the stairs was in the command center.” Mara reached out to touch the walls finding only smooth stone, no cracks or creases where a control panel could be hidden. “So maybe it leads to another command center.” She turned her head. Luke was staring up at the stairs.

He turned around gesturing to the room. “Here?” 

“It’s not going to be straightforward.” Mara turned her attention down to the dirt floor, scratched at the off white slightly rocky surface lightly with her heel, before crouching down. Saline soil, fitting with their location by the western sea...

“Mara,” Luke called, making her head snap up. “Bring the glow rod over.”

She went over to where he was along the side of the stairs. There were scratches on the sides resembling normal wear on the stone.

Luke moved closer. “Tell me you also see that.”

She gave him a crooked grin. “Half of the Imperial crest?”

He let out a relieved sounding sigh.

“But that’s just the beginning.” Mara reached over to the marks. “Might as well be an ‘x’ and everyone knows -- “ she slid two fingers along the grooves, then moved them past the unmarked area connecting them in a pattern, her movements automatic. “X marks the spot.” It was one of the many codes she still recalled with the effortlessness of muscle memory. 

Mara looked back at him. “I told you, a mechanism. Just a matter of finding it and triggering it.” 

For a second nothing happened, then a deep rumble seemed to come from the ground the wall opposite the stairs slid up, creating a doorway.

“Not an archway,” she noted. After seeing his expression she amended, “But an archway could fit in this atmosphere.” 

“I don’t know what’s worse,” Luke grumbled. “For what I remember to be real or for me to have made the whole thing up.”

There really was only one possibility as far as Mara was concerned, and it was enough impetus to find what was keeping them here so they could get back and she could haul him to the nearest med center. She felt his hand at her shoulder and looked up to him. “I don’t like worrying you like this either.” 

“Don’t do that.” She batted some annoyance at him. It was easier that way. “Let’s see if we can find that command center.” She shifted her forearm holster to a more comfortable position and went to get her glow rod.

\---

What the doorway led to was a narrow corridor, narrow enough that Mara couldn’t spread her arms fully. Once more, the exit was not visible from the opening, but the ground was certainly not uneven, and the walls were made of the same smooth stone as those of the room they’d left. After several steps, she realized that the corridor was subtly descending, the stale air taking on a faint stagnant smell.

“It’s an incline,” Mara murmured. They’d been walking how long? She checked her chrono. Five minutes. It felt longer than the stairs, but then again, Luke’s fall had thrown her perception of time off. She suppressed a twinge of irritation. After all that, _she_ should be going ahead, but even now with him taking the front line, she could feel his wariness pressing slightly. She wasn’t about to waste time on pointless arguing.

Mara kept herself from asking again if he’d felt anything through the Force. Not that she was used to stretching with it herself, having passed up on continuing to train after Wayland enough times that Luke had stopped asking, but when she did reach out there was nothing. “This architecture is strange,” she blurted out, and immediately felt sheepish for pointing out the glaringly obvious. 

The dank, pungent smell seemed to get stronger the lower they descended. 

“I wonder if Vader made this at all,” Luke’s hushed voice came back to her.

She scoffed. This fit his M.O. to a T. “Who else?”

“Palpatine didn’t construct the Jedi Temple,” he mused. “He just took it over. Some places are just strong in the Force. Strong enough to hide things.”

She would have asked more, but she felt a slight swish at her feet. Mara lowered the glow rod. There was a thin layer of water under her boots, right over the stone under her feet. 

“For goodness’ sake,” Mara groaned, finally giving in to her exasperation over being stuck in this hellhole some idiots had misclassified as a fortress. A fortress was supposed to keep beings out not in. “This better not be sewage.”

Luke turned to look at her over his shoulder with a grin she hadn’t seen since he’d woken up from the fall. Irrationally, seeing it made her felt as if things had righted themselves a little, the situation a little less disconcerting, a little less worrying. “It’s not a true adventure until someone ends up covered in muck.”

“Oh,” she raised one eyebrow, “is that your sense of humor back?”

“I’m just speaking from experience,” he said nonchalantly before turning back.

“Well, if you end up in muck in _my_ line of work, that means something has gone very wrong.”

He stopped long enough to flash her a skeptical look before continuing forward.

“I’m a business woman.”

Luke snorted. “You’re a smuggler.”

“Who works for the _government_.”

“And the top smuggling organization in the galaxy,” he added.

“It’s all perfectly legitimate, Skywalker.”

“Provided you’re creative in how you definite legitimate. Sure,” Luke conceded without missing a beat.

“ _You_ gave the Senate my name,” Mara pointed out. “And you were the one harassing me to do it.”

“But,” she could tell from the arch tone that he was smirking. “I didn’t do it because you were _legitimate_.” The word was freighted with a disdain Mara was sure no one at the Senate Building ever heard. “I did it because you’re _effective_.”

“Why, that’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” 

“Pretty sure it’s not.” 

Mara laughed, feeling a kind of squeeze in the middle of her chest that made her forget the slop of fetid water under her boots, halfway up to their calves, and the increasing smell of salt and rot. She'd thought of her head as a glitched transceiver, but the answering echo of Luke’s feelings always came to her with the crystal clarity of signals from a HoloNet waystation. The wash of them back now made her feel stupidly as if there was a shimmer right under her skin, just a bit more and she could take flight.

Even with all that, yes, distance mattered. She unknotted it in herself, it made a difference to be here to be able to reach for him if she so wanted. She could. She shut her glow lamp.

Luke stopped, giving her a chance to stow it.

“I don’t really need it,” she said. “One is enough in this narrow space.” 

He made an acknowledging noise and continued forward, reaching a hand towards her. She grasped it in hers as they continued their descent for a few more minutes.

“I see another doorway,” Luke announced.

“The smell doesn’t reassure me."

“Maybe it leads to a tunnel that goes back up to a pumping station up top.” 

“Looking forward to it. And the sonic shower after.” 

They walked through the doorway.

A deep cold buffeted her almost immediately as they walked into the room, Luke’s grip tightening on her hand. Mara could feel the cold go deeper, to the very marrow of her, her danger sense going from zero to the equivalent of a foghorn. Her blaster was already in her free hand. Behind them there was a grinding sound as the wall slid shut. Just have to find the mechanism, she told herself, taking a calming breath. 

The view wasn't exactly inspiring. It was the largest room they had been to, but how big was difficult to gauge over the gargantuan tree that took most of it, easily larger than two starfighters stacked on top of one another. The tree's knotted roots, branches, and trunk towered to darkness, only broken by eerie red light. The source of the crimson glare seemed to be in the mangrove’s crown peeping through openings from the various thick, twisting branches like a malicious surveillance mechanism. 

She turned towards Luke, feeling a nervous spike in his feelings. “What is it?” 

“The work of the dark side,” he said grimly. “It’s pulling all this from me.” 

"What?” 

“The tree inside the fortress. It’s an old wive’s tale. The kind they would tell kids when they asked why Tatooine had no oceans. That once there was a tree and all water came from it. That it had some structure at the top, a kind of citadel. This is what I've always thought it looked like.”

Mara couldn’t help but look up. She couldn’t make out anything but branches and leaves...or the shadows of branches and leaves. 

“I’ve never heard of that,” she whispered, suddenly hyper aware of the oppressive smell of decomposition. 

Luke did not look away from the scene before him. “None of the tales said what was in the fortress. But the tree had been feeding on the dead below. That’s where the water had been coming from.” 

"What good are folk tales if you can't terrify unsuspecting children with them?" Mara forced out, squelching a wave of revulsion, trying not to think of the water that gently sloshed around their feet, despite them not having moved further into the room.

Luke blinked and she felt him gather himself. “There is something here and it’s definitely tapping into me.” He seemed to push the words out as he let go of her hand, stepping in front of her. “Behind my abilities to reason, something deeper, and it’s hiding behind it all. I haven’t thought about this in a long time.” 

"Can you will this away?" she asked, knowing the answer.

He shook his head. "I don't think so. It's not pulling from me anymore." He hesitated, as if working it out. "But it's using the Force for it. We have to find it."

And before she could say anything, he lifted his voice.

“Okay, show yourself. You’ve made your point.”

There was no response, complete silence...and the soft swish of water. 

Luke shrugged. "Worth a try."

They waited a few moments.

Mara gritted her teeth. It wasn’t going to come to them? Fine.

“The light source.” She holstered her blaster. She dropped her pack, grabbing an extra vibroblade and some frag detonators from it. She reached for her vibroblade and collapsible holster folded into her boot. "Has to be the light source.” 

Mara reassembled the sheath as a waist holster and began walking towards the tree. “Bet if we grab it, whatever it is won’t be so quiet anymore.” And now she was just _angry_. 

She felt Luke’s determination flow as he walked beside her, his hand by his lightsaber. 

“Been a while since I’ve done any tree climbing,” she said conversationally, putting her hands on the thick root nearest to her and lifting herself to it, maybe a meter from the water covered ground. The tree surface was damp, but not enough that she couldn’t get a decent hold on it. The worst part of it was the smell...and the perpetual screaming from her danger sense -- not for the first time, she lamented it didn't have enough specificity. 

“Can’t say I thought I’d be doing this when I woke up this morning,” he replied in the same tone. He was using the Force to jump from root to root and was a good six feet above her on the tree, every time he jumped up he’d turn back to light her way, which freed her hands so she could climb faster.

“That’s how it goes isn’t it?” She sped up her climb even more, the dense web of roots and branches around them, making it less difficult than she’d initially expected. 

“Didn’t Karrde have one of these on Myrkr?”

“No, not one of these.” It was much smaller and it wasn’t a mangrove. “That one was an olbio tree,” she gasped out as she climbed up a steep root. “A real pain to plant on the base too. Had to do research on how to do it for _weeks_ , took two tries for it to take. They’re finicky like that.” 

“All for me?”

“Don’t be silly, Skywalker.” She had to stop to catch her breath. “Karrde didn’t know what could come knocking. He just wanted to be prepared.”

“Now, that’s just hurtful,” Luke replied offhandedly. Mara couldn’t see him all too clearly from the shadows between the tree branches and roots, but thought he might be looking up. That creepy light was still a good yard up by the looks of it and the way up was only growing steeper. “To think--” 

“Shhh.” Luke fell silent. She thought she could hear movement below...something like a rustle or maybe a slither, and stopped to listen.

Nothing. 

Mara tightened her jaw. The last thing she needed was an ecosystem with all sorts of creepy crawlies in it. She turned back to the root she was trying to climb. 

Something wet and slimy brushed against the back of her arm. 

She shouted out a startled curse, losing her grip, suddenly sliding down the root she was climbing. 

“Mara!” she heard Luke’s panicked yell as the light from his glow rod receded. Her instincts kicked in half a second later, her hands going to the blade holster as she drew it out to stab at the tree surface to stop her fall. 

She hung for a second, disoriented, adrenaline pouring through her veins, before she realized Luke was calling her. His voice sounded distant, she couldn’t gauge by how much, but she had to concentrate to find the light from his glow rod. 

“I’m okay!” Mara yelled back. She only had that near useless weird red light to go on. It was some illumination, but the area immediately around her was too shrouded in shadow. 

She heard the _snap hiss_ of his lightsaber, pinpricks of green only visible from far, she assumed, because of the roots and branches crisscrossing thickly before it. 

“Luke?” 

“Hang on. I’ll cut my way to you.” 

Mara clenched her teeth and pulled herself over into the top of the root -- branch? Whatever. She panted, crouching on her hands and knees to get her breath back. She ignored the throbbing from her tricep and groped around for the knife still stuck in the tree and wrenched it out. Probably pulled something. She’d think about that once they’d blown this creepy blasted tree to bits. 

Mara sat back in a crouch and looked up towards the crown of the tree. She squinted. The branches where she was now went up in a vaguely rope ladder-like formation. “Hey, I think I see an easier path up.” 

“I’ll be there in a second.” 

She turned her head in the direction of Luke’s voice. A second was putting it very optimistically judging by how far the dark between them extended and the sound of his voice. 

Beneath the hum of his lightsaber she thought she could hear something else. That same rustling. 

Mara felt her lip curl. If it thought she was going to calmly be prey for it...that was just the first principle of hunting. You got to it _first_. She holstered her knife and went towards the trunk. If it wanted her, it would just have to go up to where the light was and see what odds shook out then. 

“Luke, I’m going to get a move on,” she announced. 

“What? No, wait!” 

“Something around me is _moving_ ,” she called back. “I’m not just going to stand there and wait for it. Meet me at the top.” 

“Wait, Mara!” 

But she was already focused on making her way up. The advantages of a frag detonator were its small size, they were slightly smaller than her closed fist, and their limited power in a place like this. One of those could probably blow up a good portion of the tree, but it wouldn’t risk bringing the whole deathtrap on them. It would still be enough to take care of whatever evil thing was lurking in wait, or at least make it think twice. Most things, evil or not, tended to stop doing whatever they were doing once they got a proper blasting. She thought of last time. Or a lightsaber to the chest. Maybe she _should_ have kept Luke's old lightsaber. So much for symbolism. 

She was not going to dwell on the rustling getting closer. And she wasn’t going to think that it sounded like whispering. Certainly not words. 

Mara sped up her climb, that red glow growing brighter, filtering through the tree’s limbs. 

She shook her head. That thing was starting to get to her too. She furrowed her brows. Not limbs. Branches-- 

Something wet and cold at the side of her neck. 

She didn’t fall this time, part of her had almost been expecting _something_ , and she just tightened one grip, as with her other she let go, grabbing her blade and swinging it behind her. 

Into nothing. 

Mara frowned. It was doing something, using the atmosphere it'd drawn from Luke to scare them both. But pulling old memories was different from actually controlling thoughts. Mara turned back to the trunk, holding the blade by her teeth so she could speed up her climb and to keep it accessible should anything strike out at her. She was close enough that the way up was almost completely lit, she could see the angle of something metallic through the branches -- the underside of a prism? But when she went to grab onto the next branch she found nothing but smooth trunk for a good two meters. 

Mara cursed under her breath and looked to see if there were more branches to her side that went up to where the red light was brightest. There were branches, but only after a gap of about a meter. She couldn’t jump to one, or she could, but had no way to get a running start. Judging by the branches narrowness, the risk was not only not making it, but making it and having her momentum send her right off it. The branch to her other side was even further away. 

Mara holstered her knife and crouched down, as much resting as trying to think through the next step. If she were in top form she could climb up through her blades alone, but she wasn’t twenty anymore and her life was a bit more...sedentary than it once had been. 

She looked outwards from the trunk to the shadowy areas where the branches interwove. She could go outwards from the trunk and see if the distance between the branch she was on and the one beside it narrowed. The problem was losing the sparse visibility she had while moving away from the red light. 

It wasn’t like she had many options. She did have a mini glow rod on her belt if it came to that; she just preferred her hands be free. 

Mara wandered out into the shadows. It wasn’t as dark as she thought it’d be. She recalled from somewhere that red light helped the eyes adjust to the dark. She could make out the branches and reached out for one, climbing on it like a beam. She walked back toward the way she came, but the branch joined with another, and she found herself climbing up the closer she got to the general direction where she’d departed from, the shadows gradually peeling back as the red light bled through underneath. By the time she had made it back to the tree center, she was above where she wanted to be, but she could see thin underbranches that she could use to climb down to the room-sized, u-shaped tree fork where a triangular prism-shaped object was. She carefully swung herself down from one branch. 

It was no louder than a murmur. A low hiss. Mara paused. 

Perhaps there were some pipes somewhere. She continued her climb down. 

“I don’t scare easy,” Mara spoke up and immediately felt embarrassed for doing so. 

She tried not to dwell. 

_ssel...ssel...ssel..._

Mara forced a smile. The answer to what to do when the tariffs were choking you. 

_ttle ssel...ttle ssel...ttle ssel...ttle ssel..ttle ssel..._

“You’re really going to have to work on your Basic," she muttered. "If you want to comm--” 

Cold and wet by her ear. A whisper in her mind and out. 

“ _Little vessel._ ” 

Her mouth opened as she drew breath to scream-- 

She was falling, wind whipping through her hair, brought her arms up to cover her head as she slammed through branches. They cracked, giving way, ragged pieces of them slashing through her arms. More impact, bruising, cutting, breaking, and then only -- 

Pain. 

Too much to breathe for a few seconds. She was on a hard surface. Her voice was being called as if from far away. Bright light assaulted her even through closed eyelids. Luke’s glow rod. 

Mara opened her eyes to a blinding red glare. That light blared from above, from the small pyramid-shaped object that hovered maybe a couple of meters over her, scratches in the flat area underneath it. 

The scratches were _moving_ , wriggling slowly like dark insects, forming blurry words before her eyes. 

  
I N SH  
I NS HAD DOW S

“Mara. Mara.” She registered warmth at both her cheeks and shifted her eyes to Luke, his hands at either side of her face. 

“Luke,” his name came out jumbled. That thing. Even her thoughts felt sluggish. She raised her hand to point at it, and the gesture unleashed pain so sharp she bit down on a cry. Luke reached out to clasp it in his, a worried look on his face. 

She closed her eyes and pushed everything back, when she opened them her thoughts, at least, felt less foggy. 

_That thing_ , she thought at him. 

His head snapped up as if noticing the object for the first time. 

_You have to destroy it._

He grabbed his lightsaber from where it was next to him and slashed towards it -- and stopped, jerked back, his eyes wide and horrified on her. 

“What?” Mara whispered. 

Luke blinked and she reached out, seeing it clearly through his eyes. He swung the blade, and upon contact with the side of the pyramid, her screaming voice pierced the air. _Her_ , as she was on the gargantuan branches that formed the ground, blood spattered and covered with twigs and leaves, but _shrieking in pain and trying to crawl away, her fingers scratching at the ground, collapsing on too-weak limbs like a mortally wounded animal, wailing, don't--don't--don’t hurt me please. Please don't hurt me. Please._

Mara rolled to her side, tried to get on her hands and knees...and crumpled to the ground, still dazed from the fall and now, more so by the anxiety that poured of Luke at the illusion. 

“Not real,” Mara breathed, following the words with certainty. “Not real. Using fear. Yours.” She needed to get up. Her ribs. Pain wrapped like a tight band around her middle. Needle sharp. She gritted her teeth at it. Just. Get. Up. 

A thunderous rumble shook the surface underneath her. 

“In shadows,” she wheezed. “In shadows...there is power.” 

Luke’s eyes darted towards her, the lightsaber still in guard position. “What?” 

She summoned enough strength to get back gingerly to her feet, holding an arm around her midsection, and lifted her free hand to point at the apparatus still hovering. “It’s written...” 

A flare of tension from him made her take a shaky step back, and he stepped more fully in front of her. 

“It’s a holocron." Luke's voice was tight with dread, as if he’d known, but only put it to words now. “A Sith holocron.” 

“It’s...hiding in your...shadows,” she continued shakily. “Your fears. The...deeper, darker, they go... the more power...it gets. No logic. No reason. Feedback loop.” 

He closed his eyes. “Just fear,” he said, turning back towards the object and raising his lightsaber. 

The tree itself seemed to roar, thin branches twisting into themselves. The glow rod fell into the blackness of branches below, plunging them into darkness save for the illumination from Luke’s lightsaber. 

Mara felt the rough of the tree’s bark as one vine-like branch wrapped itself around above her ankle. Over stabbing pain at her side, Mara reached for her vibroblade to give the branch a pathetic slash just as the green of Luke’s blade severed it. The screech of pain got worse with the movement; she cried out when he pulled her to him. 

“Ribs,” she bit out to his alarmed look. “A couple. Broken. Maybe. Your pain blocking --” 

He swiped at another branch coming at them, drawing from the Force to sense them through the darkness. “You might make it worse!” 

“Don’t care,” Mara yelled as he yanked her out of the way of another, cleaving it as he moved back. It was taking all of her effort not to let her knees buckle. “Deadweight otherwise!” 

Luke flinched, but he knew she was right if they were ever going to get out of the tree. He faced her, placing his free hand to her side where the pain centered. She reached for one frag grenade at her utility belt on the other side. His eyes went down to her hand and back up to her face. She allowed herself a smile and thought she saw the ghost of one from him in return by the glow of his blade. “I’ll cover us.” 

Mara felt him concentrate, his presence in her Force sense shinning. She reached out, training all her awareness on any danger. Movement from above Luke’s shoulder a couple of meters away. The pain had receded as she pulled the frag grenade out. Luke fell to a crouch, just as she lifted her arm and sent the grenade flying. She ducked automatically, feeling Luke slide protectively against her back -- 

_boom_ \-- 

He shifted off with a pained grunt. By the light of his lightsaber she saw a hazy pike-like shape in his left shoulder. 

“Luke--” 

“Hold,” he shoved his lightsaber at her and wrenched it out. 

Incredibly, he looked at her after he was done, and asked hoarsely, “How do you feel?” 

Mara blew out a sigh and handed him his lightsaber. “Peachy. But that,” she summed up, “was not a datacard of Sith techniques.” 

“No,” Luke agreed. “It’s something else that snuck in and made its home there -- a holocron could be a body for it, a container." Mara felt him stretch out with his Jedi senses. "So is this place, I think” 

"Is it gone?" She hoped what she felt were leftovers. There'd been too much going on to tell.

"No," he said flatly. "I couldn't touch it."

He stood making his way to the side where she’d thrown the grenade, open air where there had been a dense web of branches. “I think I see the bottom.” Mara approached, craning her neck. The glow rod was below them, lighting up a path that had been cleared by the explosion. To the side of the main affected area there was a branch a foot below them swooped down in a smooth inclined path maybe ten meters down. 

“All right,” she said. “Let’s get to it.”

Luke tentatively put a foot forward and into the branch by the light of his blade. “Oh. There’s some resin or sap or something. Slippery.” He seemed to consider it for a moment. “We could probably...slide down.” 

“No.” Mara shook her head, looking at him with disbelief. “Absolutely not. I already fell several stories down. Not doing that again. Let's just climb down. All of this can't be free,” she noted after a moment. "There's got to be some energy expenditure. We have some time before it comes back at us. " 

"Probably," Luke said. "But you said it yourself -- it's a feedback loop. How much time until it gets enough out of me to go again? Not to mention taking the scenic route down gives it more opportunities to get under our skins." 

“Okay, fine.” She stepped forward. “So then what?” 

"We know what it is. I won't miss again." He took another look down, then deactivated his lightsaber. “Just hold on to me.” 

A rustle in the darkness. She cursed. Of all the most preposterous nerfbrained ideas...but she wrapped her arms around his waist. 

_Don’t let us fall_. 

“It’ll be okay,” he murmured. 

The next thing she knew they were skidding down, wind blowing her hair back, her stomach plunging, all of her body feeling like disconnected parts. She wrapped her arms tight just over his utility belt, her cheek pressed against his back as the incline and their forward momentum pulled them down, the light of the glow lamp below growing brighter. In the speed and darkness-induced disorientation, she wondered why they weren’t careening off, but she could sense the Force, eddies of it around them like a cocoon, encircling them, holding them in place as they slid down, then nothingness under her feet -- 

Water. She thrashed for a bit until she remembered the water was shallow enough to stand in. "Luke!" 

“Here!” Whirling, she saw his figure not too far. 

“I think I see you,” Mara called back moving in his direction. 

It was too quick, she’d barely felt any movement, but she was being pulled up, by her ankle. Mara felt the blood rush down to her head as she was lifted up high. The area around them suddenly lit by red light, she could see the artifact floating maybe a foot above her foot as it was held over her head. 

Luke’s lightsaber went flying, and at first she thought it was towards the holocron, but it never rose high enough, slashing through the branch curled around her ankle. She was falling and then she wasn't, her body righted and floating in the air, while the blade spun back up towards the artifact. Mara felt a spike of alarm, heard Luke's surprised cry and thrashing in the water, and she was falling again, so was the lightsaber, and she could only think of that thing in the holocron. She braced herself, as she extended her hand, _pushing_ Luke's blade back up with her meager abilities, shoving it forward until it cleaved the artifact, the wave of malevolent energy slamming her back down against the water.

"Luke," she groaned, standing with difficulty. "Luke!" 

Mara reached out with the Force, even as she dug around her utility belt for the mini glow rod. Her anxiety doubled with every second he didn't answer. She felt him out there, but there was something wrong in his Force presence. Hurt? 

"Luke," her voice sounded odd to her ears, quaky and shrill. "Luke!"

Mara heard him cough up water and turned towards the sound

"Here." She had to strain to hear him. It definitely didn't sound like he was okay. She held the glow rod in front of her and rushed in the general direction from which she'd heard his voice. A figure crouching over the brackish water took shape as she approached. She all but jumped towards it with a shout.

"It bashed me up pretty good, but I'm okay." His whole face was a bloody mess and his arm was in an awkward angle. Seeing her, he made an ungainly attempt to get up. The light illuminated a mass of twigs and sticks floating on the water's surface. It must have grabbed him and flung him to the ground.

"No, wait!" she warned, ambling over to snake a stabilizing arm around his waist. They'd have time enough to regret all their aches and pains later. "Just take it easy. We don't know where you're wounded--"

"We have to go." His voice was preternaturally calm, as if he'd cleared off his daze by pressing a button. 

A hysterical laugh bubbled from her throat. "Oh, we're going all right, but first--"

Again his voice was deadly serious, as he tugged at her arm. "It's not gone."

"Not gone?" she spluttered. "What do you mean not gone?" But he was hauling her now and she moved the light of the glow rod forward to shine upon some stairs that materialized. He urged her up the first steps, turning to look behind them. He didn't answer.

"Luke?"

"Keep going."

Mara tentatively went up an extra step then whirled. "You need to talk to me. I'm not going further until you tell me what's happening." 

He took the first step up, the sides of the stairs began crumbling either side.

" _ssel...ssel...ssel...._ "

She shook her head, and swept the beam of the glow rod around her. "No." She looked at Luke again, his face drawn. "No, I used your lightsaber. I saw it happen." 

" _ssel...ssel...ssel..._ "

"No!" she screamed, reaching for his arm. She felt her face twist. "It's gone! It has to be!" 

He lifted his chin back to the stairs. “Keep going, Mara.” 

“No!” She reached out for his arm. 

" _ttle ssel...ttle ssel...ttle ssel...ttle ssel..ttle ssel..._ " 

“You have to." Luke's calm fractured for a moment, eyes growing haunted, expression pained. "This thing -- it can hurt you.” 

"It...just," she tried vainly to argue. "It just pulls. It doesn't get into your head!" A shake began to ripple through her. "It doesn't control you." 

"Not me," he agreed. "It can't control me."

What he didn't say made her feel as if she were falling.

“I can’t, she whispered, looking down at her feet while an icy chill permeated her whole body. "I can't leave you.”

" _ttle ssel...ttle ssel...ttle ssel...ttle ssel..ttle ssel...._ " 

He shook his head, composed again, and brought a gentle hand under her chin to urge her to look up. “You’re not. I’ll be right behind you,” he said lightly and her breath caught in her throat. He was a terrible liar.

" _ttle ssel...ttle ssel...ttle ssel...ttle ssel..ttle ssel..._ " 

“This was a bad idea,” he continued in that same light tone. “I hope you won’t hold it against me.”

She swallowed over the furious pounding of her heart, the sour taste in her mouth. “Oh, I will, Skywalker. I’ll hold it against you for,” her voice went down to a shaky whisper. “For -- for." The words failed her. She went down the scant steps and pressed her lips to his, tasting blood and dirt. 

He pulled gently away, his smile made her think of cracking glass. “I--I was scared you’d say that.” A rumbling noise came from the corridor. 

" _Little vessel..._ " 

“Go!” he raised his voice. “Now!” The urgency in it made her take two steps up and when she looked back he was gone. 

She closed her eyes. There was silence, and that was almost worse than the whispers. One more step. Another. Her body felt heavier with every one of them as if she were dragging weight behind her ankles. Would it be worth it to reach the surface that way? To feel it when she woke up and when she fell asleep? For...For...she couldn't complete that phrase. 

Mara shut her eyes. 

She turned around and went back down. Pain burst into being in her side, getting worse with every step. Stairs and more stairs down, down until she arrived at a small octagonal room, wheezing. There was a small round table in the center and the two pieces of the holocron glowed red floating over it. 

“Where is he?” Mara whispered. Then louder. “Where is he?” 

Mara stretched out with the Force, only sensing the stench of the dark side around the room. 

“I'm not afraid,” she said between agonized breaths. “My old master. Stronger than you. You're just...shadow.” 

Shadows took shape on the walls, like black ink. Aurebesh letters. 

YOUR MASTER IS DEAD

Mara took a step back. The shadows dissolved into the red glare before forming new words. 

WE COULD BE YOUR MASTER NOW 

She forced out a brittle laugh to quell the panic that tore at her insides. "I'm not taking any applicants." Funny how her insides felt like they were being literally torn out. “Tell me," she gasped out. "Where he is.” 

Mara stretched out again, feeling a kind of undulation in the darkness, a fissure in it. Below. Without thinking, she shunted all the pain aside, seized the small table and dashed it against the floor again and again, calling the Force to her with everything --all of her rage, all of her fear, all of her hope, the stones gave way to something softer and she fell to her knees digging, hands scrambling upon cold, wet earth. 

Mara found his hands first, fingers white like worms in topsoil, the lightsaber still in his hands. She screamed his name, hollowing out the soil with even more frenzied digging. His skin was so cold to the touch, but reaching out, there was his presence, if in strange fragments, not as that fountain of light that she knew it to be. Bit by bit, she swept the dirt from one cheek then another, his face ethereal and serene enough that she could almost forget the soft shadows cast by cuts and bruises by that macabre red light. She patted at his cheek lightly, her heart bleeding right through her ribs. 

“Come on, Luke.” She pulled with all the Force reach she could muster, but his presence was too splintered. Mara went through his vitals with increasing dread, no breathing, no heartbeat. She went automatically into chest compressions, ignoring the haziness at the edge of her consciousness, a wipeout looming, but not now, not now. In some part of her, she knew that here, in this horrible place his vitals didn't matter as much as that fragmentation she felt in his Force presence. She had no idea what to do. She called Luke's name and repeated the cycle. This, she could do, she had to do, and maybe -- 

With a gasp, Mara looked up to see a dark shape and froze. It was only a silhouette. That thing was picking up images from her mind. 

“I remember,” she croaked. “How my old master felt. You're not him.” 

“Little vessel,” the figure’s voice spoke like many voices in metallic harmony. “You have set us free, you have brought us sustenance. You can stay and serve if you so desire.” 

“I what?" she reached for Luke's lightsaber. There were worse things than death. "No." 

"Leave." 

Mara thought she saw a slight tremble in the walls and blinked it away. 

“Not," she breathed. "Without him.” 

“We are not finished feeding.” 

She knew then. Felt it. The blankness that Luke had felt in the Force was from that, that malevolent entity draining everything around it as it hid in fear. It was draining him too. Killing him. 

In one fluid motion, Mara stood and ignited the blade, swinging the lightsaber, cutting through the two pieces of the holocron. As she completed her swipe, she teetered slightly on her feet, stabbing pain all she could feel for the next seconds. The dark shape didn't laugh, but she could feel its amusement. The holocron reassembled into the first pyramid-shaped object she'd first seen it as. 

" _You_ cannot harm us. You are like us."

"I'm nothing like you," she spat out. 

"Wait until we finish feeding. We will show you. You have set us free and you will be rewarded."

That made a shudder run through her and she knew there was just one way out, just as she whirled to release Luke from that foul thing. She'd be right behind him--

Suddenly her hand opened as if by a will other than hers. She looked on in horror as her lightsaber fell to the ground, deactivating and rolling away towards Luke. She reached for her vibroblade and managed to draw it out for a half second before her hand opened and it too fell down beside her

"Wait until we finish feeding. We will show you," the holocron entity repeated. "A great many things."

She could do nothing but watch it happen. Had she come back to be here -- to feel him fade entirely, leaving her with the knowledge that it’d been _her_ through some taint she'd never known she had, that _she’d_ brought him here to that disgusting dark side leech. For her to be at its mercy in the end? 

She’d done it, she thought her eyes falling on Luke's still form. It’d been her and there was nothing she could do. Nothing she could do. Nothing she could do, the beat of her heart a flutter of moth wings after being run through by a pin. Useless like death spasms. Nothing. Nothing. 

Nothing. 

__ She. _ _

__ Could. _ _

__ Do. _ _

Calm fell over her. 

Draining, her mind thought with a strange distance. The opposite of filling. She’d been filled once, power to the brim. 

Once. 

Turn.

__ Sink. _ _

__ Deeper. __

To a door sliding open in the far reaches of her mind. An inner chamber deep within. Half forgotten whispers. 

_An experiment. One to bait the dark, one to trap it. Both bait and vessel of Sith alchemy wrought._

She was the bait. It was the vessel.

_It._

The bait didn't move from the entity's grasp, couldn't, but her eyes took on a liquid somnambulist stare.

From the holocron entity, surprise washed out as something _else_ extricated itself from the body, radiating menace. “You cannot defeat us," the holocron entity told it. 

It would have laughed, but like the entity, it had no mouth. No form. 

_I don’t want to defeat you, shadow demon_ it sibilated, nonetheless. _I want to consume you. I have so hungered._

The shadow demon did struggle against the asphyxiating press upon it, but years of ensnarement in a holocron had made it weak. By contrast, the bounds of flesh were porous; power always seeped in like blood through gauze. Always would. The dark arts had progressed much more since the shadow demon's time. Evolved. 

Easy enough to coil around the shadow demon, push it under, while whispering, _You belong to me now_ until the demon stopped writhing. 

Some time later, it rolled over, embodied again, and now free from the shadow demon's grasp. It moved with the sluggishness of a beast that had overfed. Skin seemed to sit uneasily on it. Much preferable to crawl than walk. The body felt pain along its middle, but it didn't. Tangled hair fell on its face obscuring its vision. No matter; it didn’t need eyes to see. With twitching fingers it picked up the holocron. 

Red light illuminated a face with thick shadows from spattered blood, bruises and dirt, long hair in disarray, an uncanny vacancy in its stare as if it were seeing otherwise.

It crouched and began a careful parsing of all that was light, tangling and untangling dense strands and setting them free from where they'd been stored inside the holocron. 

Finally, it brought both hands over the holocron, crushing the object. As if with a spasm, the hands opened, bits charred electronics falling, smoke curling upwards. 

Slowly, it crawled back, slithered perhaps, to a vibroblade that had fallen on the ground, it’s hand moving spasmodically towards it, closing after one or two attempts. It marveled at the blade's weight in its hand, it's delightful capacity to bring insides outside. 

A short while later, the glowing prone figure a few feet from it made a weak groan and shifted to curl away, as if recoiling instinctively. 

It’s head shot up at the movement. What would it be like -- 

The bait’s call made it draw back, a serpentine hiss breaking from it, even though its body didn't open its mouth. _We are still so unformed..._

The bait's hold didn't lessen. Tightened, rather, to an almost choking extent.

A hateful snarl burst from it, shaking the very foundations of the fortress. The ground trembled with its rage, as power gathered, then was released. Power enough to shatter the walls and ceilings, to send dirt, stone and duracrete flying, finally revealing two figures, one human, one human-looking under the murky glare of the cliffside moon. 

Fury vented, it receded into inner fathoms, deep, and deeper still where there was only the dark. It drew itself as small as it was deep. Readied itself for comfortable sleep. 

The bait was home, after all. 

Mara opened her eyes, blinked once, then closed them again, falling back onto the ground. 


	3. Chapter 3

III.

 

“Luke!” 

He opened his eyes, shivering. He sat up quickly, and regretted it almost immediately. It was never a good sign when the only part of you that didn't ache was your prosthetic hand. The next thought was that he’d heard the call as much as he’d felt it.

“Leia?” He met his sister’s concerned eyes. Another thought filtered almost instantly. “Mara!” He sent his awareness once the thought surfaced, relieved when he found her presence.

“She’s fine, Han’s with her.” Leia had no more gestured that Luke stood up, instinctively drawing up some pain blocking techniques to avoid toppling over, heading a few yards away to where he felt her, dimly registering the sound of the pounding surf and wind, while noticing that the area around them looked like it had been part of a missile strike, debris and ruins everywhere. 

“Luke, she’s fine, just...” Luke barely heard Han as he stumbled to crouch by Mara’s sprawled form. Through the Force he sensed she was alive, but there was a strange dark aura around her, fading quickly. She had cuts everywhere, the worst being along the outside of forearms, bits of twigs and leaves stuck to the wounds, but some scratches inside her arms too, her cheekbone looked smashed and he was sure her nose was broken. But then she opened her eyes, green and clear, if disoriented, and everything else faded in light of the feeling of being able to breathe again.

“Luke. Solo?” Confusion spread over her features “What happened?” 

“I don’t know,” Luke mumbled, helping her sit up.

That turned out to be a bad idea because she let out an agonized whimper. 

"That's what I was trying to tell you," Han supplied. "The way she's breathing, looks she took a pretty hard hit." 

Mara nodded, even that motion seemed to cost her. "Accurate," she wheezed with a grimace. 

Han looked over at him. "You don't look too good either, kid." He gestured to Luke's arm with a wince. "Your arm's not in great shape. What tried to make you meat on a stick?"

"I'm okay," he replied reflexively, but couldn't help making a face at the stab wound he found when he followed Han's eyes. His whole shoulder, in fact, looked worse for wear. He hoped it was only a dislocation, he'd deal with it via trance once he could. "What happened here?" 

“Don’t look at me.” Han flashed a look at Leia who’d bent down beside them a pair of blankets in her hands. "We just got here."

Luke turned back to Mara, brushing a hand just under her jaw, possibly the only part of her face without a bruise or scratch. “How do you feel? Apart from the ribs. Anything thing else?”

“Ask me again in a couple of hours and I'll have a list for you. You really know how to show a girl a good time, farmboy.” He felt her taking stock of him. “You okay?” Luke nodded, and she continued, “Because I’m pretty sure you look worse than the other guy.”

He laughed and kissed her lightly. She tasted like dirt and blood, and he kissed her again.

Han cleared his throat. “We should get going. Both of you are due at the nearest med center.”

“Is the whole place like this?” Mara asked after Luke pulled away. They were where the military base had once stood although there was no indication of it, the whole of the cliff reduced to a debris-strewn crater, like the surface of it had been gouged out.

Leia nodded. "When we saw this coming up," her voice went strained, "We didn't know what to think. Maybe some self-destruct...

Han reached out to put an arm under her elbow.

She smiled a bit shakily, and Luke had a feeling there was more than that. He inched towards her a little.

“Where’s the speeder?" Mara asked as Han helped her up.

Han and Leia looked at each other again. 

Leia was the one who answered. “It’s uh, below.”

“Below?” Mara’s voice rose a little. “Like it rolled down to the spacela--”

Han’s face tightened. “Like it went down the cliff when this place was leveled.”

“I rented that,” Mara muttered in dismay. "Just the paperwork--"

"Think about it this way -- at least you weren't in it," Han pointed out helpfully, recieving a half hearted scowl from Mara for his trouble.

“We’ll deal with that once we get back to the City.” Luke turned to Leia, still thinking of what he'd sensed from her. “You felt us in trouble?”

“Something like that. I...” She found her voice again. “You were missing for two days.”

“What?” Mara’s interjection was sharp. “Two days?”

“Almost three. And through the Force, the...nightmares...Oh, Luke.” She shook her head. Leia hugged him suddenly, the blankets caught between them. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she whispered, passing him one.

Luke looked at Han with a sheepish expression as he wrapped the blanket around himself. Han had just finished helping Mara into the speeder. "I've didn't expect any of this...whatever happened." Luke's brow furrowed as he approached, Leia beside him. If it was that bad, he'd have to figure it out somehow. "I'm glad to see you both though."

Han grinned and waved a hand, but the concern in his eyes didn't lift. "No problem. Goes with the territory. But neither of you remember?" Han asked as Leia ducked into the speeder to fold a blanket around Mara despite her weak protests. "Nothing. Really?”

Luke climbed into the speeder and shared a look with Mara who looked just as puzzled. "I remember getting here," she began slowly. "I remember that the blueprints were wrong." She paused for a long time and shook her head, a frustrated expression crossing over her face. "Nothing else. But judging by how roughed up we are I wouldn't put it past Vader to have rigged it with some sort of self-destruct or some other goodies that we had to deal with. Luke?"

He didn’t remember anything from their time in the fortress either...only feeling of growing dread, made worse by not being able to pin it to anything. 

"That's close to what I remember," he finally said as Han and Leia climbed into the speeder's front seats. "I do think there was some dark side energy there."

Mara's brows drew together. "It was Vader's fortress. Of course there was dark side energy."

Luke pursed his lips. "Not like that. Not remnants. Something else." He thought of the strange dark aura around Mara. Had she been its target? "Maybe it's just as well that the fortress is destroyed." He looked over at Mara, she met his eyes with a lopsided smile.

"Sorry your excavation of Jedi artifacts didn't go so well."

"I'm just glad we're both in one piece," he murmured and thought he would find a way of convincing her to train. It was too dangerous not to.

“Winter and Chewie will probably want to know we got them and that everything’s okay,” Leia said from her seat, fishing out her comm.

Luke let himself be comforted by the feel of Mara pressed against his side the blankets over them as the speeder's repulsorlifts came on.

“Just like old times, huh,” she interrupted his thoughts, scooting closer and raising her hand to rub gently at a smudge on his cheek. He covered her hand with his and closed his eyes. When he opened them, his eyes fell on her outstretched arm. The inside of it had the shallow scratches he’d first noticed. On a closer look, he saw they weren’t scratches at all.

They were Aurebesh letters, clumsily scribbled as if from a child’s hand.

Words in Aurebesh letters carved into Mara’s arm, crusted blood smudging some of them.

I N SHA DO W ST HE RE I S P OWE R

  


end.

 

 

and the punchy ending credits song goes:  


  
[Keep playing my heartstrings faster and faster  
You can be just what I want, my true disaster ](https://youtu.be/EFwIsrzDqMI)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys, Yavin 4 is going to be so much fun.
> 
> But seriously, a big THANK YOU for joining me in this trip to the creepy side. Hopefully it didn't disappoint too much -- the endings always tend to be a let down after the build of tension and I wanted to get this out as quickly as possible (better at writing myself onto trouble than out blah blah disclaimer.)As usual pardon the roughness. Anyway, sharing and hearing your speculation was so much fun. I love you guys. Did you all see this coming? 
> 
> Canon notes-- the bait and vessel thing is something mentioned in _Tarkin_ if I'm not mistaken. There's a fab meta rolling around I can dig up for interested parties. Naturally, I totally misinterpret it on purpose (it has to do with the Sith rule of two, it does not at all here). I mean when you use words like bait and vessel, you're kind of begging me to take it violently out of context ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> We now return to your usual programming of feels in Care and Keeping


End file.
